Slashdot Mirror

Look at the following graph, if you don't believe me -

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/slashdot.org
 

Parent makes an important point. Drudge doesn't host any news. It's sole purpose is highlighting content elsewhere on the Internet. The Huffington Post generates far more traffic than Drudge (source (this is debatable, I know)), but the site doesn't drive traffic elsewhere. It will link to another site only for as long as it takes them to copy that site's content and get their own page up to keep you on the HuffPo.

I'm curious about how they measured this also. Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to lots of places not news-related. I follow hundreds of scientists of Twitter and we don't link to the news stories about research, we link directly to the research papers themselves. There's a wide variety of "news content" that involves going directly to the primary source instead of having it mistranlated by some non-specialist. Pew has a very silly and antiquated definition of news.

So I take this study as interesting trivia, and like most trivia it's not terribly informative about the importance or influence of any of these media.

Over the same time that those crimes were taking place, Craigslist had 56 million different people visit the site with half a billion page views. There are about 50 million new ads posted to the site each month (for a total of 600 million new ads a year). So the 330 crimes are out of millions of ads and people participating in the site. That's a crime to user rate of:0.0006%. More than that is a crime to ad rate of:0.000055%. Compare that to the lowest crime rate in any US city over 250,000 people (Plano, TX) which is 1.7%. You are 2,884 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime by living in the safest city in America than you are by participating on Craigslist.

"instead of linking us to the information directly, we get a link to a poor writeup on a third-rate PR web site, possibly without an actual link to anything more relevant?"

So Engadget is the third-rate PR web site in this case? I hate to burst your bubble, but Engadget gets 4x the visitors that slashdot does, 2 million vs 500k, so really we're the third-rate website

Also slashdot stories are user submitted, so it only makes sense that their would be links to stories written by writers that (hopefully) do research.

The problem with Engadget is that it's horrendously biased and always has been a HUGE Apple fanboy.

"instead of linking us to the information directly, we get a link to a poor writeup on a third-rate PR web site, possibly without an actual link to anything more relevant?"

So Engadget is the third-rate PR web site in this case? I hate to burst your bubble, but Engadget gets 4x the visitors that slashdot does, 2 million vs 500k, so really we're the third-rate website

Also slashdot stories are user submitted, so it only makes sense that their would be links to stories written by writers that (hopefully) do research.

I've never heard of Foursquare and Gowalla until reading this.

Foursquare as over 2 million unique visitors per month. That is twice as much as /. So yes, it's a big guy. Never having heard of it before is kinda your problem here.

Two million users is nothing when the biggest players have easily quadruple that amount. Even Myspace can still boast more users. So no, they're not a big fish. Slashdot may not have as many users, but it still has a notable online presence.

I've never heard of Foursquare and Gowalla until reading this.

Foursquare as over 2 million unique visitors per month. That is twice as much as /. So yes, it's a big guy. Never having heard of it before is kinda your problem here.

Yeah, slashdot would wreck facebook and myspace, look at how much of their traffic we make up! http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com+slashdot.org/

We're almost off the axis, boys, keep it up!

I personally found this interesting: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bing.com/

Essentially 50 million instant, unique visitors at launch with little growth since. Granted, this doesn't appear to have December numbers in it, and I can't attest to the accuracy or inaccuracy of Compete -- but it still made for an interesting data point.

No, it's not 10% over anything. It's just plain 10%. Which is actually less than what MSN and Live combined used to have 2 yrs ago.

.. Slashdot doesn't, not even in the 100 most significant moments. I don't get it.

Well, as much as I prefer Slashdot over Digg (I am here after all), Digg does get almost 25 times more unique visitors than Slashdot according to here.

P-L-E-A-S-E!!! http://siteanalytics.compete.com/polygraphplace.com+antipolygraph.org/?metric=uv

The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)

Yes, Alexa is flawed because they just take their numbers at face value, they don't do any statistical analysis of their numbers. Instead of just freaking out as taco suggests, show them numbers from a company that does care about demographic distribution and statistical analysis. Use Compete.com. Here's Alexa's graph for slashdot vs digg using Alexa's metric called reach which is apparently percent of people with their toolbar installed who visited the two sites; and here's Compete's using a statistically computed number of unique visitors in a month to each site. There are other metrics available from Compete as well, but this is the core metric.

The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)

Yes, Alexa is flawed because they just take their numbers at face value, they don't do any statistical analysis of their numbers. Instead of just freaking out as taco suggests, show them numbers from a company that does care about demographic distribution and statistical analysis. Use Compete.com. Here's Alexa's graph for slashdot vs digg using Alexa's metric called reach which is apparently percent of people with their toolbar installed who visited the two sites; and here's Compete's using a statistically computed number of unique visitors in a month to each site. There are other metrics available from Compete as well, but this is the core metric.

MySpace.com hit 63,114,796 U.S. unique visitors in December alone.
Chart: http://snapshot.compete.com/myspace.com?int=1032

"According to Advertising Age a list of heavy hitter marketers are demanding third party audience data for Web sites. They will no longer pay sites for ad impressions unless they've been audited by a third party. And by 2008 they insist that online publishers have someone certify their processes for measuring ad-impressions.

This is easier for the big publishers. They have the money to spend to invest in comScore and HitWise to audits of their sites. However, when you travel down the Long Tail of content, this is going to make it harder for bloggers and podcasters to generate ad revenue from the big advertisers. The advertisers understandably want accountability. The problem is, individuals can't afford to pay to have people audit our traffic. Worse, I doubt if even some of the blog advertising networks will be able to foot the bill either." - Steve Rubel

I represent Compete, Inc. To date, Compete has limited its information to clients, but on Nov. 1st we will be releasing a publicly available service called "SnapShot". The service will feature 13 month trend analyses on any and every site our member community has ever visited... Think Alexa on steriods.

In the interim, you can find single month Compete metrics through our toolbar which is in Beta, and can be found at http://toolbar.compete.com/

Cheers!

YouTube is definitely a more intensely used product than Google Video. The data shows this. Google Video received a quick boost in traffic after they added the "Video" link to their homepage, but all other performance indicators are flat for them. More people visit YouTube, they come back to the site more often, and spend more time on the site each time they visit. Take a look at our YouTube vs Google Video analysis at (posted yesterday):

http://blog.compete.com

Just imagine a service that tightly integrated all the great stuff being created and submitted on YouTube, with their Orkut social networking platform (popular abroad), with Dodgeball mobile features thrown in + targeted contextual adverts.

Compete Blog has a different perspective on the trends using different data here.

Compete just published an alternative take on this MySpace vs. Yahoo story. Based on Compete's data Yahoo attracts 64M more people a month than MySpace - clearly establishing Yahoo as king of the court. The interesting counter is that MySpace did in fact surpass Yahoo in-terms of page views in January. permalink is: http://blog.compete.com/index.php/2006/07/13/myspa ce-vs-yahoo-hitwise/